


We All Have a Hunger  ~or~  Selfie Shtick

by NXTDNDIMHO



Series: NXTDNDIMHO [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Professional Wrestling, WWE NXT - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22619938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NXTDNDIMHO/pseuds/NXTDNDIMHO
Summary: NXT Wrestling Fan is a podcast about falling in love with wrestling. It follows NXT starting 22 May 2013. It's a good show made by lovely people.A new wrestler made an extremely distinctive and largely off-putting debut. This fired my singular obsession.This work came after Episode X: Take Your Gimmick and Go, Pal
Series: NXTDNDIMHO [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627138
Kudos: 1





	We All Have a Hunger  ~or~  Selfie Shtick

Never one to stop when I've done enough, I was inspired to keep making D&D 5e character sheets out of the wrestle folk we're meeting on this exploration of balletic battle we're going on. Instead of doing one for a character people seem to actually like (I promise, Mason Ryan as a centaur is coming), Tyler Breeze captured my imagination because I just hate him for reasons that I find interesting. I'm had a very post-modern experience making this sheet, because it is in part exactly and specifically what you'd expect and also completely different. Also, bear in mind that I'm working off of just the one appearance, because I only have time to go through this on the show's pace.

I think the thing that initially drew me to Breeze is the way that the character is drawn in the same sort of high-fashion, fey coding that Corey Graves is written in, but almost coming at it from the complete opposite end. The difference between the two expressions of Elfness outlines the way I see the divide between the two flavors of Elf in 5e that would purport to be a sort of purity of the Elf Form, The Eladrin and the High Elves. While both characters are centered on a sort of arrogant pride, I made Graves an Eladrin because he captures the wild spirit of one of Faerie Land's denizens. He is going hard for a look that communicates something about him, presented by his two defining aesthetic features: Body art and his vest. Tattoos are an artistic expression traditionally reserved to or indulged in by lower-class and/or counter cultural figures. Similarly, his vest is, as Bob pointed out, both tattered and too clean for that tattering to have been honestly obtained. Fashion is a means to an end, that end making Corey Graves look like a garbage boy. On the other hand, Breeze is a garbage boy trying desperately to look fashionable. With their position as a baseline player race, I have always thought of 'Elf' in D&D as a high-level ethnic group along the lines of Celt or Norse (basically your Culture Groups in Crusader Kings) who immigrated from the Fey Wilds to the Material Plane several thousand years ago, with the differences in sub-race coming down to the ways in which different groups of elves developed their individual cultures free of the direct influence of the Seelie and Unseelie courts and within their own, new context. High Elves maintain the broadest streak of Elven Supremacy (I mean, they fucking call themselves 'High Elves') and work to maintain the appearance of decent from the Archfey, or at least how they think of the Archfey, because the relationship is not direct so much as nostalgia expressed through pastiche. That disconnect between the effect strived for and the effect created kept occurring as I thought about Tyler Breeze, because we are told that he's a fashion boy but we only really have his word for it, the only evidence being his leg warmers, foundation compact, and a bunch of selfies taken with an iPhone with the same otter box that a plurality of sorority girls at my Midwest Liberal Arts State University had back in 2013. The absolute basicness of the iPhone case is probably my favorite thing about the costume because of this. Tyler Breeze is not a fashion icon, but rather a person selling himself to people who don't know any better as a fashion icon.

Incidentally, that's why I chose the Charlatan background. I always think of 'Disguise Kit' proficiency as having makeup and costumes to dive into. No real idea what his 'actual' identity is, but Tyler Breeze is clearly a character in a way that most of the other characters we've seen so far are not. This may just be because the character isn't developed enough to have a sense of verisimilitude, but in my head cannon, Tyler Breeze is running some sort of long con that he might just settle into.

The unexpected place that making this sheet took me was where I decided to go with Tyler's class. My first thought was that he was clearly a Bard of the College of Glamour, a school that basically bakes forcing people to treat you like the center of attention is mechanized to a kind of gross degree. But the more I thought about it, the more Bard just didn't fit. I went back to his match from the episode and the way that, when he was disturbed, he maintained a vicious offensive that showed a high degree of martial skill matched with a brutal prowess. It reminded me of one of my favorite moves from Dungeon World: Herculean Appetites.

For a bit of context, Dungeon World is an RPG that applies fantasy tropes - and specifically tropes from Dungeons and Dragons - to a set of game mechanics designed to feature narrative rather than mechanical consequences for actions. As a result, the design of the game's classes (called 'Playbooks') center on codifying a core idea of engagement with a type of character. Herculean Appetites, in this case, requires the Barbarian to choose one thing that they seek about everything else. They will generally be more successful when they are taking actions that pursue that interest, but that pursuit will also complicate accomplishing all other goals. This positions the Barbarian as a character that does not crave violence as such, but rather as a character who craves that which they are passionate for and utilize problematic and messy methods to exercise that passion. Given that, the rest of the story starts to fall into place. The thing that Tyler Breeze craves is fame and attention, and has chosen to be an extremely flashy heel in order to accomplish this.

So that's the sheet for Tyler Breeze. I couldn't decide between Path of the Berserker and their ability to attack faster and harder or a new Barbarian subclass that throws out chaotic magical effects when the Barbarian rages called the Path of the Wild Soul because I couldn't think of any way that either effect expresses something about the character. Maybe I should have created him at level 2 rather than 3, but here we are. I've finally gotten all of this out of my head and onto digital paper. You continue to inspire me to think way too much about smashing pro wrestling into my personal expression of Dungeons and Dragons, which makes me happy, so I hope you're happy about that.


End file.
